In today's information-driven society data plays a crucial role in helping enterprises to make decisions, set strategies, develop new products, and analyze trends. Data, however, can be lost in many different ways. For example, data may become corrupted, accidentally deleted, destroyed in a fire, and so forth. It is important for an enterprise to have in place data protection strategies. Traditional backups often require a large amount of time to complete because of the enormous amount of data that may be constantly generated. Thus, many enterprises rely on snapshots as part of their strategy to handle data.
A snapshot includes a set of reference markers for data at a particular point in time. A snapshot acts like a detailed table of contents, providing the user with accessible copies of data that they can roll back to. Snapshots are often created for purposes of data protection such as for disaster recovery when information is lost due to human error or data corruption. Snapshots may also be used for testing application software and data mining.
A snapshot catalog allows, among other things, browsing snapshots so that the user can see and decide the data available to retrieve. Creating a snapshot catalog and subsequently searching the catalog, however, involves a significant amount of time and computing resources because of the often large number snapshots and items in a snapshot.
Therefore, there is a need for improved systems and techniques for cataloging snapshots.
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